Hello! In this post I will be explaining how to use Zotero. This is a free tool that helps organize and store references. To get started I downloaded Zotero onto my device and then added the chrome extension to my browser to have easy access to it. I then access WMU’s library database by googling “wmu library” and entered the phrase “Women in the American Revolution” into the database’s search bar.
I also filtered my results so only articles would appear and altered the search results so 25 results would appear instead of just 10.
Next, I clicked the Zotero extension that I had just downloaded and the message below appeared:
I then clicked “select all” so all 25 of my search results would appear in Zotero. The list below is the 25 results all entered into Zotero and have been saved to my library.
If an article is not selected then no information will populate on the right hand side of the screen, but when one is selected all the information that Zotero pulled out appears.
Many different types of information appear when an article is selected it is best to double-check the information and add more if possible. For example adding tags or an abstract manually could be useful for articles where none appear, such as the item below.
Overall, Zotero is great at adding in bibliographic information, however it can make mistakes and it may need to be cleaned up especially if this information was to be used in a real bibliography. It uses API to gather data that can be used to populate the various items needed for a citation which can help save time and easily find information when collecting sources.
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